Deterministic Governance for Autonomous Financial Transactions on Distributed Ledgers: A Structural Enforcement Architecture with Cryptographic Attestation and Protocol-Native Multi-Signature Co-Signing

Autonomous actors, including AI agents, decentralized autonomous organizations, decentralized unincorporated nonprofit associations, algorithmically managed funds, and individuals operating through programmatic interfaces, are increasingly executing financial transactions on distributed ledger networks without governance oversight. Existing approaches rely on application-level middleware operating within the same trust boundary as the actors being governed, post-transaction monitoring that detects violations after irreversible execution, or multi-party computation systems that provide distributed key management without policy evaluation. This paper presents SovereignGate, a deterministic governance enforcement system that achieves structural enforcement through protocol-native multi-signature co-signing with disabled master keys. The system comprises a Rust enforcement kernel with layered crate dependencies, a deterministic policy evaluation engine with deny dominance and independent fact inference, a bylaws-as-code domain-specific language for encoding entity governance rules as content-addressed policy bundles, a cryptographic receipt chain with Ed25519-signed Merkle-anchored attestation, and a structural co-signing mechanism making transaction execution without governance approval structurally impossible at the consensus layer. The preferred embodiment integrates with the XRP Ledger. The architecture is chain-agnostic. No existing system combines deterministic policy enforcement, Merkle-chained cryptographic attestation, and structural protocol-level co-signing for autonomous financial actors.